Americans without college degrees will decide if former President Donald Trump returns to the White House, as education status increasingly rivals race and gender as a key indicator of how someone will vote.

Poll after poll shows that more voters with college and advanced degrees are backing Vice President Kamala Harris by double digits.

At the same time, the trend is effectively reversed among Americans with a high school diploma or less. Those voters powered Mr. Trump’s win in 2016 and are backing him again.

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The candidate who can cross the “diploma divide,” or at least turn out more voters on their side, could win the presidency. 

Recent polls show a slight erosion in the massive edge Mr. Trump enjoyed with White non-college voters, in particular, over his opponent in the last two elections. He’s working to expand his base, from promising no taxes on tips in a bid for Nevada hospitality workers to donning an apron and scooping up french fries behind the McDonald’s counter.

“What Trump is doing is clearly trying to expand the pool of non-college voters,” said Michael O’Connell, a GOP strategist in western Pennsylvania. “Trump is not coming off as part of the elite. Some of it’s just a shtick, but it’s a shtick that’s proven successful.”

Ms. Harris, meanwhile, is trying to cross the educational divide by saying a four-year degree shouldn’t be a requirement for economic success. She says that as president, she would direct the federal government to look at a full array of employees and encourage the private sector to do the same.

“We should not be falling into a trap that suggests only those with a college degree have the skill or experience to do the job,” she told Pennsylvania voters this week. “Let’s look at which of those jobs would benefit from a skilled, experienced worker who perhaps went through an apprenticeship program, not a four-year college.”

Ms. Harris also copied Mr. Trump’s no-tax-on-tips promise.

Generally speaking, issues like race and gender tend to overshadow other indicators of how people might vote. 

Ms. Harris is scrambling to release policy proposals aimed at Black men amid signs they are breaking away from Democrats toward Mr. Trump.

The gender gap, which has been present in every U.S. presidential election since 1980, is still in play this year, with more women backing the Democrat and more men backing the Republican.

Yet educational attainment has been pushing its way into the conversation as a leading vote indicator, given its stark visibility.

Voters without a college degree leaned toward Mr. Trump, 52% to 46%, while Ms. Harris led among college graduates, 56% to 43%, in a mid-October poll from Quantus Insights.

An earlier poll from Suffolk University showed particularly stark differences between persons with advanced degrees, who favored Ms. Harris, 63% to 29%, and voters who went to a trade school — they favored Mr. Trump by a 63% to 25% margin.

The Republican Party writ large holds a 6 percentage point advantage over the Democratic Party, 51% to 45%, among voters who do not have a bachelor’s degree, according to a Pew Research analysis from earlier this year. 

While these persons make up 60% of the electorate, Democrats enjoy a wider, 13-point advantage — 55% to 42% — among those with a bachelor’s degree or higher.

“This pattern is relatively recent. In fact, until about two decades ago, the Republican Party fared better among college graduates and worse among those without a college degree,” analysts wrote.

Doug Sosnik, a Democratic strategist and former adviser to President Bill Clinton, said the education divide started to emerge in the 1990s when the digital economy began replacing manufacturing.

“The winners are people with college education, and that’s the base of the Democratic party. The people who feel they’ve been left behind felt that Trump was speaking to them, and that is now — that group of voters — is now the Republican Party base,” he told the “CNN Political Briefing” podcast.

Experts say the divide is driven in part by culture — for instance, college-educated persons are more likely to support LGBT issues and access to abortion, aligning themselves with Democrats.

Non-college-educated voters may also feel like they’ve been left behind economically. A recent analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found families headed by someone with a high school diploma had 22 cents for every $1 of wealth held by families headed by a four-year college graduate.

Mr. Trump spoke directly to struggling non-college voters during his political rise. He said illegal immigration and bad trade deals were undercutting their economic fortunes. 

He’s revisiting those themes against Ms. Harris, saying immigration is the number-one issue and promising major tariffs on foreign goods in a bid to bring manufacturing back to U.S. shores, though economists say the plan won’t work as promised.

“President Trump has assembled an unprecedented coalition of support from every corner of America and all walks of life because his message of freedom, prosperity, and security resonates with everyone — especially working families,” Republican National Committee spokeswoman Anna Kelly said. “Black, Hispanic, and Asian Americans, and voters across all educational backgrounds, are leaving the Democrat Party in droves to join the Make America Great Again movement, which is why President Trump is more well-positioned than ever to win.”

Ms. Harris is courting new audiences to eat into Mr. Trump’s voting blocs, conducting an interview with Fox News and reportedly seeking a sit-down with podcaster Joe Rogan. 

“The Democratic Party used to be sort of an island of misfit toys, a coalition of various types of underrepresented minority groups. Now, they’re the party of suburban, college-educated normies,” political predictor and statistician Nate Silver wrote in a piece arguing Ms. Harris needs “weird voters.” 

White voters without a four-year college degree fueled Mr. Trump’s rise. They backed Mr. Trump 64% to 28% in his 2016 victory against Democrat Hillary Clinton, according to Pew Research.

“Prior to 2016, differences in candidate preferences by education were typically much smaller than they were that year,” Pew Research said in a piece that dissected President Biden’s win in 2020.

While Mr. Trump won a roughly equal share of White non-college voters in 2020, about 65%, Mr. Biden outperformed Mrs. Clinton in this group, winning 33% instead of her 28%.

An October poll from the New York Times and Siena College found Ms. Harris is attracting the shame share — 33% — of White non-college voters while 63% backed Mr. Trump, suggesting a slight decrease in his advantage within this cohort.

In purple states like North Carolina, even small shifts can matter.

“Certainly, there’s the idea that if one camp to peel off or get defectors from the other side, little movements can have huge consequences in a state like North Carolina where the state-wide margins of victories are on the knife’s edge,” said Michael Bitzer, director of the Center for North Carolina Politics & Public Service at Catawba College. “Trying to expand one’s base — and especially among those voters who may not be prone to showing up to cast a ballot — is another strategy to add into the mix.”